I criticise Raila but I’m not opposing his bid
Practically none of our umpteen presidential candidates passes muster. Yet only against three or so would I campaign vehemently.
Why? Because reality tells me that our marketplace is unlikely to throw up any candidate of my moral and intellectual ideals.
No, Raila Odinga is not among the three. True, I criticise him. But to criticise an individual or ethnic community is not necessarily to campaign against them.
As I often say, criticism of one’s society and its leaders may stem merely from a desire to help raise them to the highest level of unity, success, happiness and prestige.
My criticism of Jaramogi’s son is not driven by any wish to prevent his triumphal entry into State House. My aim is only to help him to wriggle out of the straitjacket he now operates in and hasten the realisation of the great potential I see in him as a future paramount chief.
Indeed, if he gets to be as ariap as Daniel arap Moi and as methodical as Mwai Kibaki, what can stop this latter-day Gor Mahia?
Ariap is Dholuo corruption and “adjectivisation” of the English invocation “Hurry up!” — with which the colonial Briton used to invigorate his employees whenever he wanted them to increase speed and vigour at work.
Social events
And, while Mr Moi was the most ariap of our three presidents yet, we must agree that Agwambo is the most ariap of all our presidential candidates.
He responds on the spot — and proactively — to all social events and all criticisms levelled both against him and against the government of which he is the Premier.
Yet, ironically, that is where his problem lies. The “proactivity” is seen as activism. In their elite-nurtured tribalism, other communities continue to see Raila as destruction personified, the bull in china shop of the “Second Liberation” rampage, the stone-throwing Gor Mahia rabble at the political rally.
There are still too many pugnacious “Young Turks” in his entourage. Ababu Namwamba, Fred Gumo, Otieno Kajwang, Jakoyo Midiwo, James Orengo, Rachel Shebesh and others continue to refuse to graduate from the chest-thumping heroics of the campus radical — from the all-knowing juvenile — into adulthood, imaginativeness and creativity.
No, the objective Raila critic is not driven by malice, but only solely by the PM’s apparent unwillingness to tap the mental energy swirling around him into a reservoir to be channelled into causes that conduce much more effectively to the development of Kenya and, in particular, of Luoland.
Media apologists — Sarah Elderkin comes readily to mind — do Mr Odinga’s image much greater harm than good by positing him as the Angel Gabriel.
This is what has created the unhealthy and totally unacceptable situation whereby, in Luoland, you cannot emerge as a political leader unless — as Watergate’s John Dean confessed — you “kiss somebody’s arse”.
Ethnic community
It is agonising that in an ethnic community once unequalled in intellectual wealth, all that mental energy is being siphoned off into an individual’s political machine, while child mortality is approaching its zenith and the mass is hungry and developing backwards.
If I were not a loyal Luo, this communal sacrifice of all development interests on the altar of a tiny elite’s narrowest political self-seeking would not bother me.
I do not say that Luo leaders should give up the power struggle in Nairobi. I say merely that this struggle should be driven primarily by their people’s objective providential needs.
But, if the Luo leaders think that the Luo masses are but Myrmidons — useful only during elections — the leaders are inviting serious challenge.
Yet when a man with much greater development credentials announced such a challenge recently, a self-styled “Luo Council of Elders” retorted that Mr Raphael Tuju simply wanted to ruin Mr Odinga’s chances.
Such moral and intellectual twaddle in Mr Raila Odinga’s name is what is likely to fatally damage his quest for State House.
